Change suggestion: add forum descriptions to the forum pages

[JayM]

I know y'all have a lot on your plates right now but in this thread I suggested that the forum's template be altered to make it show the forum descriptions below the title when one clicks on an individual forum or subforum from the board index, as an aid to navigation. This is to make the board tell people what individual forums are meant to be used for and may cut down on the number of off-topic posts. For example, people posting their help requests in Tips&Tricks because they don't know any better. If the subject, the purpose of the Tips&Tricks forum, was shown just below its title, moderators might have less work to do in moving those help-request posts and users browsing the board would have a better experience by finding it full of actual tips and tricks vs. it being full of "help me" posts. Trying to figure out the best forum to post in can be a bit confusing. Maybe this would help.

Today I found out how it can be done:
Edit /styles/BoardTemplateName/template/viewforum_body.html and search for

Code: Select all

<!-- NOTE: remove the style="display: none" when you want to have the forum description on the forum body -->
	<!-- IF FORUM_DESC --><div style="display: none !important;">{FORUM_DESC}<br /></div><!-- ENDIF -->

near the top, and change it to

Code: Select all

<!-- NOTE: remove the style="display: none" when you want to have the forum description on the forum body -->
	<!-- IF FORUM_DESC --><div style="color: #105289; font-size: 1.3em; !important">{FORUM_DESC}</div><!-- ENDIF -->

then empty the forum's cache. As you can see, showing descriptions on forum pages is already provided for in the template (it is in prosilver too), just disabled by default (I wonder why?) but easily enabled.

(The color makes the description font the same as that of the title, and the larger font size makes it less likely that it won't be seen, as the original, after merely removing style="display: none' !important", resulted in a rather small, plain-black, nondescript font that was easy to overlook.)

FYI I didn't have time to try to make the forum title float left. It took most of the day just to figure out how to make the description display on forum/subforum pages. It's been so long since I used phpBB as an admin that I'd forgotten about having to clear its cache so I could see changes. :) Fixed now.

Example:


By the way (and off-topic, but) in case y'all would prefer that the subforums be displayed in a vertical column rather than a horizontal row, the extension Show Subforum Images will do this. You don't have to assign an image to each (sub)forum though you can if you want to and it will display those to the left of the subforum links. If you don't specify forum images it will still display subforums in a column below the parent forum on the board index. I tested it with the same version of phpBB that's used here and it works. It may take some tweaking of the style's CSS to cause subforums to appear in a larger font is this extension is used, if you want them to appear larger that is.

[Jerry3904]

Trying to figure out the best forum to post in can be a bit confusing.

A lot of users mention this. @Rich: can we try to do something about this? Let's mull that over...

[richb]

Worthy of discussion.

[JayM]

By the way, here's an exxample of how the board index page might look with that show subforum images extension installed and enabled:


I tried to figure out a way to get it to show subforum descriptions too, but that can't be done without modifying the /includes/functions_display.php file and adding PHP code, which is beyond my abilities. People in the phpBB support forum suggest either making them regular forums instead of subforums, or naming them such that their names are more descriptive of their purposes, as workarounds. The first would mean reorganizing the entire forum and moving posts around, so forget that. The second may cause peoples forum bookmarks to no longer work, so that's probably not a great idea either.

But that extension does give a somewhat neater appearance to the board index page, at the cost of making the page a bit taller/longer. Also I notice that the icon for the parent forum, in this case MX Help, is to the left of the entire group of parent forum and subforums rather than immediately to the left of the parent, although I see that it's the same way with subforums in a horizontal row, it's just not quite as obvious.

I'm just throwing this out there as something that's available for your version of phpBB in case you're interested, as I just happened to find this extension while I was searching for solutions to the forum description issues.

Here's another example of how it might look with subforum icons:

[Gordon Cooper]

Overall idea looks good to me. Will need some careful decisions about the Headings used.